Posts

Every year, more and more moms are getting connected and their mobile use is skyrocketing. These tech savvy moms want their mobile devices to be equipped with the best apps to help them save time, save money and make their lives safer and easier. For Mother’s Day, we compiled a list of our 12 favorite apps for iPhone and iPad and we’re sharing these apps with our readers to help them get more from their mobile devices. These apps are paid, freemium and free. Click on the app’s link to learn more about the pricing.

1. Evernote® – Rating 4+

Evernote is for note taking and it’s considered a best-of-class app. It’s a “freemium” application, which means you can use it for free and choose to be charged for upgrades.

Why is Evernote great for moms? Moms are busy people and can’t keep everything inside their heads. With Evernote, it’s super easy to take notes, organize things found on the web and make checklists. With tagging, moms can easily find the information that they’ve saved in Evernote. I like using the Evernote Web Clipper. It allows moms to “clip” information from the web and save articles, recipes and more in Evernote.

2. Dropbox™ – Rating 4+

When I first started using Dropbox years ago, it was simply a great way to share big files with co-workers, family and friends. Dropbox has evolved over the years and it has become extremely popular for file storage in the Cloud. With Dropbox, moms can store their photos and documents and easily share them with others. 2 GB of space is available for free and more can be obtained with a fee or through other actions, such as sharing.

Why is Dropbox great for moms? It’s an excellent way to back up and share family photos, receipts and other important documents. Moms can scan report cards, homework, kids artwork, etc. and save these items forever in a safe and secure place. No worries about hardware crashes. It also helps to keep the house tidy eliminating paper clutter.

3. LifeTopix™ from LightArrow, Inc. – Rating 4+

LifeTopix is an all-one-organizer for work and life. Many use it for life management or small business management. It’s excellent for getting and staying organized. It’s one of the best personal organization apps for families and anyone else who wants to boost their productivity.

Why is LifeTopix great for moms? It’s like having a personal assistant that organizes everything. Moms can organize travel, projects and tasks, events, finances, health and fitness, home assets, bookmarks, photos and shopping — all in one place, which prevents the need to jump from app to app. The Agenda view, shown below, is super handy for knowing what’s coming up today, tomorrow and in the near future at a glance.

4. Scanner Pro by Readdle – Rating 4+

I recently discovered Scanner Pro and wow I was impressed. Scanner Pro essentially turns your iPad into a scanner, saving you loads of time.

Why is Scanner Pro great for moms? As I mentioned earlier, Dropbox is an excellent way to keep the house tidy by storing documents. With Scanner Pro, moms can easily scan all types of documents, save them in a variety of sizes (A4, letter, legal, business card, etc.), and upload these documents directly to a variety of other apps, including Dropbox and Evernote. Moms can also open these scanned documents in LifeTopix allowing them to associate the documents with projects, events and other LifeTopix items. In the example below, I’ve scanned a bike map which I can access directly from LifeTopix if I get lost while cycling — no need to carry a physical map in my bike pouch.

5. What to Expect – Rating 4+

Just about everyone who’s expecting or who’s had a baby has heard of the famous book “What to Expect When You’re Expecting.” This app is based on the famous book. It’s basically a roadmap for your pregnancy on iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch.

Why is “What to Expect” great for moms? This app is especially valuable for first time moms. It offers practical advice, tips, articles, videos and message boards. It also helps moms communicate information with their spouse or partner, which is fun and helpful during pregnancy.

6. Finding Rover – Rating 3+

Finding Rover uses a new facial recognition technology to make finding dogs easy through a community of users. For example, you take a photo of your pet and upload it to the app. Someone finds your beloved pooch and snaps a photo. Voila! Your pup’s face is matched and found! And did I mention the app is free?

Why is “Finding Rover” great for moms? Every parent knows that losing a beloved pet is heartbreaking for the entire family. Fortunately Finding Rover has come to the rescue.

7. OverDrive – Rating 4+

As a leading distributor of eBooks, OverDrive offers eBooks, audiobooks and streaming video from local libraries. In fact, there’s a network of over 30,000 libraries worldwide that offers titles from OverDrive.

Why is OverDrive great for moms? Many moms like to relax with a good book, but it’s hard to find time to get to the library. In this situation, OverDrive is a perfect solution. Also, everyone knows that reading is the cornerstone of learning. OverDrive offers many titles for kids and it’s a great way to quickly introduce new books to inquisitive children.

8. Etsy – Rating 4+

Etsy is a new way to shop. Everything found on Etsy is created or curated by people running independent businesses. Essentially, if you want to find something different and unique, Etsy is the place to find it.

Why is Etsy great for moms? I think most moms would agree that they love shopping on Etsy because of the extraordinary things they can find. It also allows them to support independent businesses. And moms with an entrepreneurial spirit can create their own businesses while taking care of kids at home. In fact, Fast Company reported that Alicia Shaffer’s business named ThreeBirdNest makes $80,000 monthly!

9. Calm – Rating 4+

Calm is an app for meditation, sleep, relaxation and focus. It helps users learn mindfulness meditation and includes seven guided meditation sessions from 2 to 30 minutes.

Why is the Calm app great for moms? Moms live in a busy world and they don’t have a lot of time to relax and focus on the present moment. When stress takes over, it can take a toll on physical health. Meditation can improve sleep, treat heart issues, relieve chronic pain, lower blood pressure and improve insulin resistance.

10. RetailMeNot – Rating 4+

RetailMeNot is an app for saving money and who doesn’t like saving money? This app provides deals (online and nearby) and allows its users to view these deals by category. “Trending” deals are also provided so users can find the most popular discounts.

Why is RetailMeNot great for moms? It’s an excellent app for saving money and no coupon clipping is required. Moms can just show the retail clerk the barcode on their iPhone or iPad and be on their way!

11. Skype – Rating 3+

Skype is a service that features video calling, voice calling, instant messaging and file sharing. It’s a Microsoft product that was purchased from Ebay in 2011. Skype is similar to FaceTime and Google Hangouts, but it provides some advantages for those who want to video or voice chat with people who use a variety of devices and software. For example, with Hangouts, users are required to set up Google + accounts. With FaceTime, users are required to own Apple devices. Consequently, if you want to video chat with Grandma in Poughkeepsie who’s still using Windows 7 and isn’t keen on social networks, you’re in luck if you’re using Skype.

Why is Skype great for moms? Nothing replaces face-to-face communication, but video chatting is the next best thing. These days, many families are spread around the country and even around the world. If you can’t be with your mom this Mother’s Day, consider helping her set up Skype on her computer or smartphone. This way, you can have video chats regularly — not matter what technology she’s using.

12. NextDoor – Rating 4+

NextDoor is a free private social network for neighborhoods. According to their website, over 60,000 neighborhoods across the U.S. are now using NextDoor. When you sign up and open the NextDoor app, you’re presented with a variety of happenings in your neighborhood. It provides classifieds, crime alerts, lost and found and general information such as social events, traffic alerts, HOA meetings and news around your city.

Why is NextDoor great for moms? These days, moms are so busy it’s challenging to stay in the loop, especially if they work outside the home. NextDoor is it has become the new “Neighborhood Watch.” If anything suspicious or unusual is happening, parents know instantly through the optional notifications. It’s also a great way to sell, trade and purchase used items — it feels much more safe than using Craiglist.

Staying productive and focused when running a small business or microbusiness is difficult. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, solopreneur, small business owner or freelancer, the challenges are the same. It’s imperative to stay on top of your game and laser focused on your goals to attain the success you set out to achieve.

As you know, these days it’s important to understand new technologies and new media in order to get ahead and stay ahead of the competition. And now, more than ever before, mobile technologies have changed the ways we get things done every day.

This week, we’ve compiled a list of five technologies and systems that you must have in your repertoire in order to achieve success in our modern world of small business. Enjoy!

1. Nurture Small Business Sales Leads and Build Customer Relationships

A CRM application is a great tool for simplifying the management of your small business contacts. It integrates a variety of different information about your leads, prospects and customers all into one place. An ideal CRM also includes project and task management, allowing you to assign sales and marketing tasks that impact your sales revenue. Typically, a cloud-based CRM will cost anywhere from US $12 monthly/person to US $125 monthly/person, not including professional services and ongoing support.

LightArrow apps include many customer relationship management features that web-based CRM systems have, without the monthly subscription fees. Our apps organize a variety of customers’ data that originated from multiple places into one mobile app.

For example, our apps allow you to organize leads, track, and manage leads. You can also interact with contacts through email or social media handles, directly from their contact record in your LightArrow App. In addition, LightArrow apps include powerful project and task management features, which allow you to assign tasks to yourself or others to nurture prospects and move them down the sales funnel.

In the following diagram you see LifeTopix’s spreadsheet-like view for managing contacts. Within this view, you can access and manage all the information about your leads, prospects or clients. Specifically, you can manage all the tasks that are required to advance to a successful sale. Once the lead becomes a customer, you can manage and organize any information for this client through the 12 life topics, included with the LifeTopix app; of course, keeping track of customer details is vital for customer retention.

2. Manage Small Business Assets and Finances Wisely

Accurately managing the assets that your company owns and leases is key for the success of your small business. It’s important to track IT assets, furniture, vehicles and other items. Asset Management software can come in many shapes and forms. You can choose simple mobile asset management or an expensive enterprise asset management system. It’s also important to manage your financial assets and finances. There are several options for managing finances from simple software to more complex accounting software. Some of the features that financial software solutions offer are expense and payment tracking, receipt scanning, invoicing, etc. Foremost, remember to use the software solutions that fit the needs of your small business.

These days, using a mobile solution for asset management is an important factor because it allows you to manage and update assets easily while on the go. LightArrow mobile solutions are a great choice for the small business, entrepreneur or solopreneur. Imagine your business includes a fleet of automobiles. LifeTopix is an ideal app for managing the details for each automobile asset. You can keep track of purchase dates, cost, current value, manufacturer, model serial numbers, SKUs, vehicle identification numbers (VINs), locations (map included), and categories. In addition, you can associate tasks, appointments, reminders, notes, checklists, online/local files, bookmarks, expenses, services, audio, photos or videos with each vehicle (or other asset). An example of how you might use LightArrow apps for asset management is shown below:

If you’re a business owner who’s often on the go, LightArrow apps also offer solutions for managing finances while mobile. LightArrow mobile apps include tracking of financial information including expenses, payments, accounts, banking information, service payment templates, charitable donations, financial asset management and financial notes. With LightArrow apps, you can associate financial information with other items you manage in your app, such as assets. For example, in the graphic below, you will see that an expense is associated with an asset, which is a vehicle. Another popular feature for small business owners is the ability to set up Payment Templates with recurring payments; an example is also shown below.

3. Make Social Media a Habit in Small Business

In today’s changing world, social media is vital for small business success. In fact, according to a study conducted by LinkedIn, 3 in 5 SMBs have acquired new customers via social media. There are a variety of ways to manage and monitor social media. You can use the free tools from the social media sites, such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn all the way to using a full-fledged social media management tool.

Social media management tools provide features such as keyword monitoring and listening, all-in-one views of social media accounts, scheduling, ways to engage with others, and in some cases, further analysis and recommendations. If you want all of this functionality and more from a hosted social media management system, it will cost you a monthly subscription fee that is typically charged by the number of users.

Social media is a commitment that will reap rewards over time. Before jumping into using an expensive social media management tool, I recommend that small businesses use free and inexpensive apps and web applications to manage their social media profiles and engagement.

At LightArrow, our apps include a social media dashboard and listening via keywords through Feed Accounts. You can set up feed accounts for Facebook and Twitter; and also for Email and Evernote®. You can listen for product or company mentions, and you can stay on top of your industry by creating streams with the keywords in which you’re interested.

What makes our apps unique over the typical Social Media Management tool is you can convert the tweets and posts that you find into actionable items such as tasks, notes, events, appointments and more. For example, you might see an industry article that you believe is important to read in a Twitter feed. You can convert this item to a note and add a date tag to schedule it on your calendar. These items can be pushed to your iOS calendar, which in turn propagates to all the calendars that you’ve associated with your iOS calendar, which takes small business productivity to a new level. It’s important to note that this feature also applies to email and Evernote feeds, which allows you to accomplish “Inbox Zero” easily.

4. Unify Small Business Calendars, Reminders, Tasks and Checklists

Keeping a master schedule is important for your small business. It’s difficult to choose the right calendar app for your business schedule because there are so many choices available. All of these calendars and to-do list apps have their own unique bells and whistles. The apps you choose depend on your personal preference and business needs.

At LightArrow, we focus on productivity. That’s why we combined tasks, reminders, to-dos and eight calendar styles into one app view – with fast switching and beautiful styling. We’ve made our calendar views easy to read and they’re very simple to set up. As soon as you grant access to your iOS calendars that you use on your iPhone or iPad, your LightArrow app shows the events from those calendars. And as a bonus, your LightArrow calendar also includes your iOS reminders.

In the graphic above, you will notice Overdue, Undated and Checklist sections shown in the Agenda view. These sections include everything from overdue tasks, undated tasks; open shopping items; iOS reminders; and checklists/to-do lists. Combining these items prevents you from hopping from app to app. You will also notice the comprehensive Month view, which enables you to see all your calendar items easily.

5. Manage Small Business Projects Like a Pro

Managing your projects without the right tools is like fixing a clogged drain with a Q-tip. The more and more you push; you’re never going to get anywhere. There are a lot of options for managing projects and tasks. Some cloud applications are free for a limited number of users and others require subscription fees.

LightArrow apps are excellent for individual and small team project and task management. The advantage of using LightArrow apps for project and task management is because the projects are integrated with the features discussed in this post, as well as other items, such as appointments, reminders, expenses, services, online notes and files and more. This prevents you from hopping from app to app to find the information that you need. Small business owners appreciate the ease of creating tasks and easily emailing them to a project participant, which allows delegation or task sharing. The recipient can easily open the email message; tap on the message and save the project and tasks in their instance of LifeTopix, as shown in the following example:

In addition, if you use Asana for project management (which is free for up to 15 users), LightArrow Apps include task integration with this popular tool.

Your Turn

Please let us know in the comments how you’re using your LightArrow app in your small business or if you have any questions or comments.

Team LightArrow is very excited about some of the improvements we are making in the 5.0 update (free for all existing users) of LifeTopix. It’s already been submitted to the app store for review, and we are keeping our fingers crossed that it’ll be available to our users in the next few days.

5.0 looks very different. We took a lot of feedback from our users on usability and a more powerful way to navigate between views.

The new features in 5.0 are listed in Our Roadmap page, but we wanted to share some of the screens here for our users for a sneak peek. We hope you like the way 5.0 looks and works. We are hopeful that no changes are required to be made for the approval of this update.

Here are a few more screenshots!

My Topics on the iPad

Home view – What’s Next on the iPad

My Calendar on the iPad

Quick Menu for easy access to frequent actions

Near Me view on the iPad

My Apps view on the iPhone and iPod touch

Note Detail with Slide In Panel on the iPhone

Hot List view on the iPhone

My Topics on the iPhone

Tasks + Projects topic on the iPhone

We cannot wait until our users get their hands on LifeTopix 5! As always, we’ll continue to improve the app and have some amazing things in store over the next few months. Thank you for taking the time to view these screenshots.

Recently one of our valued customers remarked that LifeTopix is a must-have app to help with organizing her life. She is living with Adult Attention Deficit Disorder (AADD). She confessed that in the past she used a lot of different apps that managed her life data and calendar, but she had trouble remembering which app held her information. If you or your child have been diagnosed with ADD/ADHD, and the iPhone or iPad is part of your strategy for improvement, we encourage you to take a look at LifeTopix.

If you are unfamiliar with this common disorder, some of the major symptoms include being easily distracted, missing details, forgetting things, and frequently switching from one activity to another. Those living with ADD/ADHD also have difficulty maintaining focus on one task and may become bored with a task after only a few minutes. Some of the signs include lack of focus on organizing, trouble learning something new, trouble completing homework assignments, and often losing things.

There are several apps at the App Store created to help adults and children with ADD/ADHD. These apps include simple alarm clocks to encourage you to get to school or work each day on time; reminders to help with medication; apps to store emergency contacts; apps to store notes and reports for reviewing with your doctor; and apps to store health statistics. It’s fantastic that these apps are available, but they don’t solve the core problem that there’s not one place to manage everything. Managing everything in one place is essential for success to eliminate distractions from “app switching.” When you spend your time switching from app to app, the task at hand takes longer than it should — or doesn’t happen at all because something grabs your attention, and you forget what you were trying to accomplish in the first place. At LightArrow, we’ve developed LifeTopix to solve this core problem — we manage EVERYTHING you do in life — all in one place.

I’ll introduce you to a few features that can help adults and children cope with ADD/ADHD. There’s an exhaustive list of features, so I highly recommend that you explore the LightArrow website to get a full picture of how you can benefit from LifeTopix.

Daily to-do list
According to Psych Central “When things get busy, ADHD symptoms can lead a person to lose perspective. On a daily level, to-do lists can help organize your schedule according to the importance of each activity.” LifeTopix includes features which enable you to create, schedule, and prioritize using to-do lists, as shown below.

To-do List

All of these items roll up into your master calendar, and you can track daily progress.

Your Daily Planner

According to HelpGuide.org, a non-profit resource that helps people who have mental, emotional, and lifestyle challenges, it is important for those with ADD/ADHD to “make use of lists and notes to keep track of regularly scheduled tasks, projects, deadlines, and appointments. If you decide to use a daily planner, keep all lists and notes inside it.” LifeTopix allows you to accomplish this via its virtual daily planner. It is based on 12 LifeTopix.

LifeTopix gives you the abil­ity to enter, orga­nize, pri­or­i­tize, track and check off even the most com­plex tasks and projects in a stream­lined, nat­ural, and easy-to-understand way. It also works with popular apps such as Evernote, Toodledo, and Dropbox — eliminating the need to switch to those apps if you’ve stored notes, files, or tasks there. Take a look at the My Calendar view, which includes a rollup of all the data that you are tracking every day in LifeTopix

My Calendar Rollup

Progress Reports

According to Psych Central, a motivational strategy for children with ADHD is to establish a Daily Report Card. LifeTopix is completely user configurable — you can create your own report card with any values you wish using the LifeTopix Wellness Log Forms. An example of wellness log values are shown below.

Wellness Log

You can choose to log any stats with any range of values or numbers. For example, the following report card was created to track the number of times undesirable behaviors occurred during a day (on a user-defined scale of 1-10). You can track this data every day, every week, or every month — it’s up to you to decide. Teachers can create report cards for students and email the report cards to parents; alternatively parents can track these behaviors on their own to discuss with doctors during appointments.

Report Card List

You can also view the data in a graph form (line, bar, or plot), which allows you to view and analyze any trends that occur over time, as shown below.

Report Card Graph

Medication Tracking

Using LifeTopix Wellness Log Forms, you can track how you or your child are feeling each day to judge medication effectiveness. You can combine medications and wellness into a LifeTopix Multi-Topic Log Form so you can track the medications that you take and your wellness — all in one place. Similar to the Daily Report Card, you can view the data in a chart to analyze trends that occur over time.

For example, you can track the medications you are taking, hours you slept, your mood, your energy level, your ability to complete tasks, etc. All of these values can be completely defined by you — as shown below.

Medication and Wellness

Nutrition Tracking

According to Dr. Frank Lawlis, author of The ADD Answer: How to Help Your Child Now, a healthy diet is important for all children and adults, but it is even more important for those who suffer from ADD/ADHD. To help you or your child stay on track, and to analyze any associations between behavior, wellness, and the foods and drinks you are consuming, LifeTopix provides a Nutrition Log, as shown below. Once again, you can define the values any way you wish.

Nutrition Log

We hope this brief overview helps you see how LifeTopix can help you manage your life when you’re living with ADD/ADHD. Please let us know your thoughts and share your stories.

Download LifeTopix:

EVERNOTE, the Evernote Elephant logo and REMEMBER EVERYTHING are trademarks of Evernote Corporation. All other company and product names and logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners in certain countries.

A recent question on www.Quora.com, ”What is the best way to balance the use of Dropbox, Google Docs, and Evernote” inspired us to create a post describing how we support these services from within LifeTopix so that our users can easily place and track relevant pieces of information in their proper context regardless of its source. These three services (Evernote, Dropbox, and Google Docs) are the choice within their category for our users, and most users use a combination of all three based on their needs.

We’re constantly talking to our users about how they use top notes services (Evernote), top file storage services (Dropbox), and top collaborative document services (Google Docs). This has influenced us to support these services from within LifeTopix, and also helped us to understand how users want to track relevant pieces of information in their proper context regardless of its source.

This post will explore how you might use these services when planning a trip — to perhaps, Maui.

Evernote: Real note taking happens in Evernote. As a platform for notes, Evernote gives you access to your serious notes that build over time from anywhere. When planning your trip to Maui, you might want to jot down a few tourist attractions and places you want to visit by using Evernote. You can get to your notes from most devices using either the Evernote app or via a browser on your Mac or PC, making it very easy to manage the content of these long-term reusable notes. Within a LifeTopix trip, you have access to an Evernote entry used during trip planning. After syncing your notes in All Online Notes and associating the notes with a topic item, you can view your notes within the context of your trip as we show you below.

Dropbox: By making it very easy to store files from the desktop as well as from apps, Dropbox has become the file storage service of choice for our users. Again, we chose not to replicate this, but rather to allow our users to attach files from Dropbox into items within LifeTopix. For example, if you are planning a trip with a group of friends, you might want to upload travel itineraries, brochures, photos, or other files that are necessary for your trip. After adding your Dropbox file folder to LifeTopix via Notes + Files, the file becomes available for viewing in context of the Maui trip. Notice the notification on the Files icons below. Clicking that icon allows you to view and edit these files.

Google Docs: For online collaboration, personal documents, and spreadsheets, Google Docs has the most traction within our user base. Again, we allow LifeTopix items to easily associate spreadsheets and other documents that are authored, edited, and managed on Google Docs. For example, during your Maui trip, you might want to track shared expenses with your friends. Collaborating in a Google Docs spreadsheet and viewing it within the context of the Maui trip is a great way to keep everyone on track with their trip expenses.

Personal and collaborative notes, documents, and files will continue to be a heterogeneous approach based on what we have seen over the last few years. As a vendor of the most complete life organization and productivity app, we have embraced the concept of getting more value from users’ notes, files, and documents by allowing these items to be used in context.